


keep your eyes on the ground

by loveleee



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: ...for now!, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, Spoilers for 2x05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-02-01 09:40:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12702237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveleee/pseuds/loveleee
Summary: He wants to press his face against Betty’s neck and feel her fingers tangling in his hair. He wants Archie’s elbow digging into his side, eyebrows raised like he’s in on the joke. He wants his father’s hand on his shoulder, telling him he made the right choice.But Toni is the one who is here, the one whose hand rests on his back as she guides him into his bedroom, the one whose fingers push his hair out of his eyes, the one whose voice says, softly, go to sleep.(Spoilers for 2x05. Jughead's first day as a Serpent.)





	keep your eyes on the ground

**Author's Note:**

> Quick warning that there is some very mild Jughead/Toni in here, but not beyond the level of what's happened in canon so far.

They say it’ll hurt for about three days, give or take, and if he starts to bleed from somewhere other than the cuts littering his arms and his face, there’s a doctor he can see on Oxford Street who knows how to keep quiet.

Right now Jughead can’t think that far ahead. Right now he’s not even sure whether he’s going to make it through this night. Whether he wants to.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toni kisses him at his kitchen table, and for a moment, he kisses back.

Jughead kisses back, and before he can feel anything about it, one way or the other, the tentative truce patched together by the two sides of his lower lip gives way, blood dribbling down onto his chin. It feels disgusting, and from the look on Toni’s face when she pulls away, it must look that way too.

_Sorry_ , he thinks but doesn’t say, and he closes his eyes when she stands and moves towards the sink, wiping her mouth roughly with the back of her hand.

He wants to cry, is the truth. He wants to press his face against Betty’s neck and feel her fingers tangling in his hair. He wants Archie’s elbow digging into his side, eyebrows raised like he’s in on the joke. He wants his father’s hand on his shoulder, telling him he made the right choice.

But Toni is the one who is here, the one whose hand rests on his back as she guides him into his bedroom, the one whose fingers push his hair out of his eyes, the one whose voice says, softly, _go to sleep._

 

He wakes to the smell of eggs, and Hotdog’s wet nose against his ear.

He moves to sit upright, and regrets it instantly, the pain returning so swiftly that it makes him feel dizzy. He croaks out a word – what word, he’s not even sure – and hears the scratch of a chair’s legs against the linoleum. Hotdog jumps down to the floor, but stares up at Jughead, his tail wagging eagerly.

Toni appears in the doorway, her long, pink hair gathered into a bun that bobs precariously on the top of her head. Even from a distance, he can see the makeup smudged beneath her eyes.

He hadn’t realized she was going to stay.

“You okay?” she asks, her forehead creased into a frown of moderate concern.

Jughead opens his mouth to speak, but settles on a slight nod instead. She doesn’t seem convinced, but she stays in the doorway.

“I made eggs. You want some?”

He nods again, a little more enthusiastically this time, and her mouth curves up into a half-smile. “I’ll bring them to you. But this is a one-time-only deal.”

She returns a few minutes later with a plate of eggs, a fork, and a glass of the orange juice he’d been keeping in the fridge. Jughead scarfs it down while Toni watches from the end of the bed, and it’s not until his fork scrapes against an empty plate that a question occurs to him.

He clears his throat. “You went through this?” It’s hard to imagine Toni, all five feet and hundred pounds of her, making it through the gauntlet alive.

She looks back at him, and shrugs one shoulder. “Sort of.”

She says no more, but seeing his plate nearly licked clean, she leans towards him as though to pick it up, and stops, hovering just a few inches too close to pretend it’s not intentional. Her gaze flickers between his eyes and his mouth.

And he knows, with a heavy certainty that he did not possess last night when they kissed, that he does not want this.

“What, am I bleeding again?” he says flatly, trying to inject some humor into it, mostly failing. Toni studies him for a moment, her face inscrutable. She is so unlike Betty in this way; Betty who wears her heart on her sleeve, in her eyes, in her smile.

“No, but you look like shit,” she says finally, taking the plate, leaving the room with Hotdog at her heel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Sweet Pea will be by later today,” Toni tells him before she leaves.

_Is that a promise or a threat?_ he almost asks her, but reminds himself just in time that there are no more threats; not from Sweet Pea, at least. Jughead is a Serpent. He’s one of them now.

She leaves him propped up on the couch, his laptop open on the coffee table before him, a pitcher of water and a bottle of Tylenol beside it. He makes it through twenty minutes of Kill Bill Part 1 and about ten of Part 2 (the better of the two, in his opinion) before admitting he can’t concentrate on a movie right now.

He shuts the laptop and eases himself sideways, laying down along the length of the couch where he’d slept tangled up with Betty less than a week ago. Hotdog jumps up and circles once before flopping down beside him, tucked up against his sore, maybe-cracked ribs, and Jughead pets the little dog absently, his fur soft and warm against his fingers.

Archie’s words play on an endless loop in his head: _she’s been trying to break up with you for weeks_. _She saw what you were becoming. We all did._ While Jughead had dreamt of escaping Riverdale with Betty, Betty had only wanted to escape Jughead.

It wasn’t crazy, the idea that Betty Cooper had finally come to her senses and seen him for what he was, which was to say, not the type of boy that belongs with a girl like Betty Cooper.

But he’d believed her, when she’d said that she loved him. That Riverdale was his home. That she missed him, worried for him, wanted him. He’d believed the way she’d kissed him at Pop’s, lingering, the little hitch in her breath when she finally pulled away.

And he’d meant it. Every look, every touch, every word: to run away from here and never look back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hotdog wakes him up just past noon, whining and pawing at the front door.

Jughead shuffles over and opens it, his head swimming. He sits on the top step, leaning against the doorframe, and watches Hotdog pee on a patch of grass, then meander around the trailer park, sniffing at the gravel and twigs.

That’s how Sweet Pea finds him when he arrives thirty-odd minutes later, a case of cheap beer in hand.

Sweet Pea stops before the bottom step, resting one arm against the wooden post. “You’re not wearing your jacket,” he says.

Jughead looks at him in disbelief, but before he can respond, Sweet Pea is rolling his eyes. “I’m kidding.”

He looks up at Jughead expectantly, but Jughead gives him nothing. _You fucking idiot_ , he wants to say, _I’m fucking doing this because of you and your fucking pipe bomb, jackknife bullshit._

To his credit, Sweet Pea seems to recognize the simmering resentment, and ignores it. He raises the case of beer up. “To dull the pain.”

Jughead eyes the beer skeptically. “Really. Wouldn’t whiskey get the job done better?”

Sweet Pea scoffs. “Like you could choke down a fifth of whiskey,” he says, and climbs the stairs, stepping past Jughead into the trailer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

They sit at the kitchen table, a beer each in front of them, the rest shoved into the freezer to chill faster. Jughead sips his slowly. It tastes just like the shitty beer he’d sipped at parties in years past, dragged by Archie to some football player’s house or another.

_See, you’re not so different after all,_ he thinks, watching as Sweet Pea downs half a can, the sarcasm thick even in his own mind.

The silence between them is thick, too, and unbroken until Sweet Pea grabs two more beers from the freezer only to find that Jughead’s barely made it halfway through his first. “Seriously? This is for your benefit.”

“You don’t have to babysit me,” Jughead snaps. His head hurts; the beer, contrary to Sweet Pea’s opinion, is not helping.

“Actually I do,” Sweet Pea says, and cracks open another can. His adam’s apple bobs violently as he drinks. “And I knew I’d have to get fucking drunk to do it.”

“You can go. I’ll tell them you were here,” Jughead says, not even knowing who he means by _them_ , if there’s actually someone in charge of all this, or if Toni had just guilted Sweet Pea into showing up because Jughead, quote, _looked like shit_.

But Sweet Pea just shakes his head. “Second rule.”

“No Serpent is left for dead,” Jughead drones. “Right.”

Sweet Pea stares at him. “You _still_ say it like it’s a fucking joke.” He shakes his head slowly. He frowns at the can in his hand, then looks back at Jughead. “You act like you’re so much better than all this. When the Serpents have been keeping a roof over your head for _years_. Running around with your Northside friends – what, did you use a fake address to keep going to that school? All while your dad’s busting his ass?”

_Busting his ass._ It’s all Jughead can do not to laugh. Getting home drunk in the middle of the night because F.P. was _busting his ass_. Driving his wife and daughter away over state lines because he was _busting his ass_. Letting his son live in a closet at the local high school because he was _busting his ass_.

Yet there’s a grain of truth to it, nonetheless – because F.P. had clearly been working at something all these years, and now that he was in prison, it was all falling to pieces.

It just hadn’t been his family he was holding together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sweet Pea drinks five beers to Jughead’s one. They watch Pulp Fiction on the laptop, stony silence between them. Hotdog sits on Jughead’s lap.

Around sunset Sweet Pea gets up to leave, taking what remains of the beer with him.

“Who’s next? The ghost of Christmas future?” Jughead says as the other boy opens the door.

Sweet Pea frowns. “What?”

“Nevermind.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daylight bleeds away, and Jughead is alone.

Well, not alone: there’s Hotdog, begging for food. Moving slowly, Jughead boils them each a few actual hotdogs from the fridge. Unsure if a whole hotdog is a choking hazard for a dog, he errs on the side of caution, and cuts two of them up into chunks that he puts in a bowl on the floor.

After eating Jughead returns to the couch, again, and cues up Young Frankenstein on the laptop. Hotdog follows him and jumps up beside him, nosing behind the pillows, into the gaps behind the cushions. He snuffles extra hard into the corner, and when he turns back to glance at Jughead, something in his mouth catches the dim light of the computer screen.

Jughead grabs him gently by the nose and pokes his fingers into the dog’s mouth, finding the small, hard object quickly. An earring. A small, diamond-stud earring; one of the ones that Betty wears every day, without fail, in the middle holes on her earlobes. She never took them out, she’d told him, because once she’d gone a week without them in and the holes had closed up around the empty space. It’s a miracle Hotdog didn’t just swallow it.

Betty must have noticed it was missing. But she hadn’t said anything. Hadn’t asked him to look for it, or bring it with him to Pop’s. Or even give it to Archie.

He pulls his phone out of his pocket, opens up his texting app. The last one she’d sent him was nothing sentimental: _see you soon._

He types the message out quickly and hits send, before he can doubt himself. _I found your earring in my couch._

The little typing symbol appears at the bottom of the screen, then disappears, too quickly for any reaction other than his heart to start thudding. He waits, and then types out: _Can we talk?_

He hesitates, then hits send. The symbol appears again, and this time his chest feels tight, like it’s too small to contain the hope suddenly swelling beneath his ribcage.

He watches the screen for so long that his eyes start to water. When the message comes through, the phone gently buzzing in his hand, he has to blink three times to read it.

_No._

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jughead takes three Tylenol PMs, each with a sip of water, and eases himself gingerly into his unmade bed. Hotdog joins him, curling up behind the bend of Jughead’s knees. The night is dark and quiet, save for the faint whistle of the dog’s breath, and the occasional slam of a car door somewhere down the road.

Jughead closes his eyes.

One down, infinity to go.

 

 

 

 

 

 

_And if we_   
_Had just held out for tomorrow_   
_We might have seen_   
_What seemed so far away_   
_We didn't even bother to stay_   
_There it goes I can tell_   
_You're going to keep_   
_Your eyes on the ground_   
_Waiting for someone_   
_To finally come around_   
_And tell you what you knew_   
_That you weren't wrong_   
_And it's finally time for so long_

**Author's Note:**

> I set out to write a "Veronica confronts Betty and finds out about the Black Hood and comforts her" fic and I ended up with...this!
> 
> I have a thing for writing scenes with characters I don't actually like on the show: Polly, Toni, Sweet Pea. It's weird.
> 
> Anyway, I very very much appreciate comments, and would very very much love to know what you think. 
> 
> Last but not least! The title, and the lyrics at the end, are from the song "So Long" by Rilo Kiley.


End file.
